Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

----- Original Message -----

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 4:28 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

>   You surely realise how subjective such evaluation is. So how do you propose to make it part of a scholarly argument?

*****GK: By not doing the same thing you are. Viz., not "understanding" or not even responding to my simple points [e.g. the need for collaboration between various approaches in the solution of Indo-European issues], and trying to fit them into the procrustean bed of your own presuppositions, with an additional sprinkling of semi-contemptuous "hopes" about my views on Slavic and Nuristanic, and comments about my way of seeing things reminding you of rather reactionary Bible pounders. The last pretty ironic I think.*****

 

Take a breather. My apologies if anything I have said can be construed as semi-contemptuous. I mention "evolution" (which is not a religious or ideological concept) and you respond by putting "Bible pounders" and even "Hitler" into my mouth. I wasn't thinking of Bible pounders (they are not comon critters where I live, thank God): rather of those nineteenth-century scholars who argued in good faith that Darwin couldn't be right because the age of the earth as scientifically estimated at the time was much too short and the pace of evolution was apparently too slow if the emergence of new taxa could not be observed in progress.

 

If you want collaboration, the best way in which different disciplines can only contribute is by defining their respective _constraints_ on the PIE homeland problem. Linguistics is privileged here -- not because I have the arrogance to say so, but because, as Steve has eloquently explained to you, without rigorous linguistic reasoning there would be no PIE to talk about. PIE is a linguistic construct, whatever extralinguistic entities it may correlate with.

 

I know very little about "PIE culture" apart from its most general aspects, or rather I know enough about the limitations of linguistic palaeontology to be aware of the extent to which the term "PIE culture" has been misused and manipulated; but I know a lot of rather concrete stuff about the PIE _language_ and its descendants, and I know how to evaluate various origin-and-dispersal scenarios according to _that_ knowledge. You're free to ignore my opinions but it's usually more prudent to listen to specialists carefully if they know something you don't know.

> Where is the evidence for that quick spread and such massive "mixing" as opposed to the ordinary course of differentiation?

******GK:(new) That's where the archaeology comes in.*****

Does it? You won't see the mixing of languages in the archaeological record unless you find some written sources. Massive mixing would have left its fingerprints in the structure of the proto-branch languages (strong substratal influence or even traces of creolisation), but that is not what we usually see in Indo-European except in peripheral areas (Armenian, Anatolian, Tocharian) or in fairly recent times (cf. the strong Latinisation of Albanian -- but Latin is also IE). The differences between Greek and Old Indo-Aryan or Lithuanian and Latin do not consist in the presence of different substrates. The Indo-Aryan languages engaged in extensive "mixing" when they entered the Indian Sprachbund, but the level of non-IE influence was still low in Vedic. Greek has numerous substratal loans, but it is internal change that accounts for the distinctiveness of Greek.

 

Piotr